Identify customer needs and pain points to retain customers, build customer loyalty, and attract new customers through a voice of customer analysis.
What is Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the Customer analysis (VoC) is a presentation of customers’ feedback around their experiences with and expectations of a brand’s products or services. Businesses collect and leverage this feedback to ensure customers are at the center of decisions made across the organization — from product development and marketing to service and strategy.
Why is Voice of Customer Analysis Important?
Customers have increased expectations for companies, and failure to satisfy customers will cause them to turn to your competitors. Consider these stats:
- 85% of business buyers expect sales reps to demonstrate a firm understanding of their business
- 77% of consumers view brands more favorably if they seek out and apply customer feedback.
- 86% of consumers will leave a brand after only two or three bad experiences
To offer an exceptional customer experience, you need to collect and address customers’ needs and expectations. The best way to gather targeted insights about your customers is through a voice of customer analysis.
What are the Benefits of a VOC Program?
Gathering and leveraging VoC analytics through a VoC program offers many benefits across the company, including:
Understand Your Market and Customers
- Gather insight into the needs, preferences, and expectations of current and potential customers
- Identify key inflection points in customers’ decision-making process
- Understand when, where, and how to reach customers
- Create targeted messaging that resonates with customer needs
Drive Revenue and Growth
- Increase customer retention
- Identify upsell opportunities by understanding customer pain points
- Improve brand KPI (key performance indicators) through enhanced products and services
Customize Products and Services
- Tailor products and services to meet or exceed customer expectations
- Prioritize initiatives based on customer pain points
Increase Competitive Advantage
- Attract new customers and expand market share
- Generate positive word of mouth through improved customer satisfaction
- Cultivate loyal customers by showing your dedication to optimizing their experience
How do you Measure Voice of the Customer?
Measuring the Voice of the Customer should include both qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection across multiple platforms, otherwise, you risk skewing or limiting your view on customers.
Quantitative data include:
- Survey Data
- Point of Sale Data
- CRM (Operational Data)
- Net Promoter Score ®
Qualitative Data Include:
- In-depth Interviews (IDIs)
- Focus Groups
- Online Discussion Forums
- Journaling
Identifying the Right VOC Research Solution
To evaluate the voice of the customer to enhance your offering and meet their expectations, you need data that identifies three key elements :
- Customers’ behaviors and preferences
- The path customers take to purchase
- The experience customers have with your brand
Step One: Understand Customers’ Preferences And Behaviors
The first insight you need is to identify who your customers are and what drives their actions. The customer insights revealed during this stage help develop and build a foundational understanding of customer values and behaviors.
Common Research Studies:
- Brand Equity or Health: Brand equity surveys are designed to reveal your brand’s position in the market relative to your competitors.
- Customer Segmentation: Customer segmentation is typically a survey with a cluster analysis that groups customers based on behaviors, attitudes, demographics, and psychographic data.
- Customer Needs Assessment: A customer needs assessment identifies key elements of your buyers’ experience with your brand, including whether and how your products or services address their needs, pain points, and challenges. It also assesses their purchasing behaviors and which product attributes matter most to them.
Step Two: Define Path to Purchase
Once organizations establish a baseline for defining customers and how they feel about a brand, product, or service, the next step is to identify key inflection points that impact the customer experience. The insights gathered at this stage provide valuable data regarding the means to effectively reach customers to influence brand perceptions and purchase decisions.
Common Research Studies:
- Attitudes and Usage: Attitudes and usage surveys compare how you perceive customers’ usage of your offerings versus how they actually use it, to uncover gaps and flaws in your products and services.
- Path to Purchase: A path to purchase evaluation tracks how customers interact with your offerings, identifies relevant stakeholders, information sources, and channels that guide purchasing decisions, and uncovers key inflection points from initial interest to purchase.
- Customer Journey Map: A customer journey map provides insight into how customers interact with a brand throughout their entire lifecycle, from awareness to consideration, purchase, and retention.
Step Three: Understand the Customer Experience
Once organizations understand the foundational characteristics of their customers, their motivations, and how to reach them, now it’s time to evaluate their experience with your brand. Data at this stage provides insight into customer pain points, dissatisfactions with your offering, and opportunities to improve specific elements of the customer experience.
Common Research Studies:
- Customer Satisfaction: Customer satisfaction surveys evaluate how happy your customers are with your products and overall experience with your brand.
- Customer Decision-Making Process: This research uncovers the rationale behind specific purchases to reveal key purchase drivers and bring visibility to the “why” behind a sale.
- Customer Churn: This research expands beyond identifying the rate at which customers do not return to the brand compared to those who return for repeat purchases and digs deeper to identify trends in dropped versus loyal customers.
Ensure your voice of customer analysis gathers accurate, actionable insights by working with our VoC experts.
How to Leverage Voice of Customer Analytics
After you collect voice of the customer data, you need to define your goals, adjust your strategies, and evaluate your performance.
Set VOC Program Goals
Before you begin leveraging your VoC data, you need to first determine what elements of your offering you are focused on enhancing. Look at the list of benefits of a VoC program listed above and identify a few goals to target first. By narrowing your focus, you can ensure you are collecting the right data (including asking the right questions) and building strategies that effectively address your biggest challenges and weaknesses.
Incorporate Voice Of Customer Analytics Into Your Strategy
Once you have finished collecting and analyzing your VoC data, it’s time to integrate those results into your decision-making and upcoming strategies. The data should be discussed frequently and included in discussions at all levels within the organization. The level to which organizations react to customer feedback and integrate the results will determine the program’s overall success.
Monitor and Evaluate the Impact of Your Voice of Customer Strategy
The last step in leveraging your VoC analytics is to track how adjustments to your operations have positively impacted customers’ experience. How you evaluate change depends on the elements you sought to effect and the new strategies you have put in place. Some common forms of evaluation based on voice of customer enhancements include customer satisfaction evaluations and customer retention rate.
